Germanic Collections

By B.Venkat Mani, graduate student, German Studies, Stanford
University

The Frecot Collection, recently acquired by the Germanic Collections
of the Stanford University Libraries is a rich cultural documentation
of quite a few untapped aspects of Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany.
The collection is a result of 30 years of efforts in archival
search and acquisition of the Berlin archivist, and since 1978
the founder-director of the Photographic Collection at the Landesmuseum
Berliner Gallerie, Janos Frecot.

Born in Romania in 1937, Frecot considered Berlin his home
since he was 10 years old. His main profession, that of an editor/publisher
of bibliographies on musicology did not keep him away from his
interest in the subaltern history of the metropolis Berlin, a
city marked by the presence of subcultures and alternative thinkers.
His acquisition of two books in 1965 from the Berlin antiquarian
dealers: Bruno Wille's Offenbarungen des Wachholderbaums
and Wilhelm Spohr's Oh Ihr Tage von Friedenshagen channeled
his interests towards aspects of the Reform Movements. This coincided
with his coming in contact with the daughter of the painter Fidus,
who had inherited from her father his collection on the Reform
Movements, covering such facets as vegetarianism, the nudist culture,
the youth movement and the theosophical movement. Although this
acquisition resulted in Frecot's co-authoring a book on Fidus,
Fidus 1868-1948. Zur ästhetischen Praxis bürgerlicher
Fluchtbewegungen (Munich: Rogner and Bernhard, 1972), his
interests did not stop there. Awareness of the fact that the journals
and monographs belonging to these alternative movements appeared
with small or very small publishing houses caused him to frequent
such sources of acquisition as flea market sales and the sales
of the antiquarian bookdealers, gifts from people who were involved
with these movements and gifts from members of the Fidus family.

Frecot sees these alternative movements as symptomatic of the
prevailing suspicion towards the 'development' that characterized
modern times, a detour from the decadence of the city life on
one hand, and paradoxically, an urge to develop taste in living
style, luxury and comfort. He organized the 1500 books and monographs,
and 850 holdings of some 250 magazines in 15 categories. These
categories have been rethought and reconfigured for Stanford's
Frecot Collection in order to make it more beneficial for the
research interests of a late 20th Century student/scholar of cultural
studies. Items in each category have further been arranged in
ascending order of their chronology to enable the reader to follow
the temporal trajectory of the growth, development and decline
of many an alternative public spheres in the German linguistic-cultural
realm.

While vegetarianism, alternative methods of healing (#1),
belief in astrology and phrenology (#10)
do confirm Frecot's observations, there are other significant
issues in contemporary culture studies that are addressed by various
other categories. The third, which covers the nudist movement
and body-culture is also a rich source to explore the beginnings
of a homo-erotic aesthetic, although it was directed towards 'construction'
of heterosexual Aryan masculinity. A magazine like Gesellschaft
der Eigenen is an interesting exception for its open support
of an androgynous corporal aesthetics. Gender issues gain interesting
dimensions in the books written by or about women (#6),
or perspectives on sexual relations, marriage and family (#4).

Familial containment and material possession become issues
in the land-reform movement, (#2),
which furthered the cause of the nascent German bourgeois family.

Alternative intellectual strains of thought and perspectives
on education are covered in #8
and #9,
the latter being a chief source of writings of Rudolf Steiner.
A myriad of issues is covered in #12
which represents the Friedenshagener Kreis and # 14 , a miscellaneous
category.

The dangerous strains of alternative thought come in the super-reactionary
thought on race-theory and Heimat-Kunst in #13,
traces of which can be seen in #5
on the youth movement.

Peter R. Frank, former curator of the Germanic Collections
at Stanford describes the acquisition of Grimms' dictionary with
the Hildebrand library as a factor in transforming the Stanford
University Libraries into a (high culture) "Gelehrtenbibliothek"
( library of the learned). The acquisition of the Frecot collection
by Henry Lowood, Curator of the Germanic Collections at Stanford,
is a giant leap in enriching and diversifying this "Gelehrtenbibliothek"
through popular sources of alternative thought.